A flood of government stimulus and aid helped keep the worst effects of the pandemic at bay for millions of Americans. But with the end of those programs, economic and food insecurity are on the rise and the groups responding to the growing needs of local residents are finding it difficult to hold the line.
When I visited Second Chance Foods in the fall of 2021, the space was cramped and frantic.
Volunteers bounced around the small kitchen, chopping up a gymnasium’s worth of donated produce at an ever-increasing pace so that it could be quickly cooked into nutritious meals. Dishwashers and squash scrubbers took turns at the same sink. A storage closet had been turned into a walk-in fridge by jamming in an air conditioner and jury-rigging the temperature control so the unit never shut off.
America throws out about 40 percent of the food it grows, and more than 47 million Americans don’t have enough to eat. At first glance, it would seem that you could solve both problems by keeping food out of trash cans and redirecting it to food pantries. Storage and shelf life are two of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of that. How can you get perishable food to someone right away? And what if they don’t know what to do with 3 pounds of kale and a turnip?
Second Chance bills itself as a “food rescue” organization, a cross between a food pantry and a soup kitchen. They gather food — be it from a field or a supermarket — that’s a few days away from expiring, and extend its life by turning it into fully prepared meals. The meals are then portioned out into individual servings, frozen (further extending shelf life) and donated.
It’s an operation that runs on generosity and volunteers. While both of those things are in ample supply in the Highlands, cooking space is not. The organization was having to refuse donations and leave food rotting in the fields because, at its space inside the Community of the Holy Spirit in Brewster, there wasn’t enough room to process and store it all.
Then they found out that they would have to move: The space was being turned into a music camp. Disaster was averted when a 4,700-square-foot space once used for 60 years as a catering kitchen became available. Second Chance moved in this past spring.
Visit today and it’s as bustling as ever, though nowhere near as confined or hectic. Volunteers spread out across several rooms, with separate sinks for dishwashing and food prep. Multiple walk-in coolers — real ones — are filled with donated food, as are a walk-in freezer and several chest freezers. A new energy-efficient heat pump whirrs away in the corner, and an ample loading dock makes it easy to accept the large donations that Second Chance finally has enough space to store.
“This kind of space does not exist anywhere,” says Martha Elder, Second Chance’s executive director. Three years ago she was the organization’s only full-time employee; now she’s one of three, in addition to three part-time staff. About 300 people now volunteer with Second Chance throughout the year, up from about 50 in 2021. Even the location itself, in downtown Brewster as opposed to 5 miles outside of town, is more convenient.
“We used to be out in the country,” says Elder. “Now we’re right in the middle of this area in which people are living in very desperate circumstances. It feels like this was meant to be our home.”
The change in fortunes couldn’t have come at a better time.
In 2021 there was a sense of optimism among the many people working to address hunger locally. The pandemic was changing the way people thought about food insecurity, and governments were finally treating it like the public health emergency it always has been.
Means testing, the arduous process of screening people before helping them in order to assess if they truly needed assistance, had temporarily fallen by the wayside, allowing nonprofits to help more people, and faster. The stigma around food insecurity was fading as more and more people who never thought they would need help found themselves jobless because of the pandemic. Government aid flowed freely: the American Rescue Plan Act, emergency rental assistance and an expanded federal child tax credit credited with lifting millions of children out of poverty.
“One could argue whether or not that’s sustainable, propping up the populace with government stimulus, but you can’t deny that it had an impact,” said Tom Gabriel, president of the United Way of Westchester and Putnam. “People were finally getting ahead.”
In 2022, governments decided that it was not sustainable. Congress did not renew the expanded child tax credit, pushing millions of children back into poverty and doubling the national childhood poverty rate overnight. Other pandemic protections expired: free school meals, extra benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (colloquially known as food stamps); and pauses on student loan and utility payments.
Some markers of economic health continued to improve: Unemployment was low, the stock market was up, wages were slowly increasing. Inflation was easing, especially compared to other countries around the world coming out of the pandemic. Economic pundits have scratched their heads over the past two years, wondering why Americans kept saying in poll after poll that the economy was bad when their numbers were telling them a different story.
Gabriel doesn’t think the data itself was wrong. He just thinks the data that economists were touting weren’t telling the whole story. Unemployment numbers don’t track the underemployed, the underpaid or people who dropped out of the workforce during COVID to take care of family and haven’t returned. He doesn’t think we should be looking at the stock market, either. “There are so few people that actually have access to the stock market, that should never be a metric on how well the economy is doing,” he said.
The data they should have been looking at, Gabriel said, was there all along.
ALICE still lives here
A few decades ago, the United Way of New Jersey created a statistic to measure people who don’t turn up in poverty data: ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed). These are people who may earn above the poverty line, but below the basic cost of living in their respective counties. They are the working poor who make too much to qualify for government benefits but lack savings and are one unexpected emergency away from economic ruin. According to the United Way of Westchester and Putnam, they are growing in number.
“There’s this huge gap between federal poverty levels and the reality of how much money people need to make to actually pay all their bills and still afford nutritious food,” said Elder.
In both Philipstown and Beacon, 38 percent of households were under the ALICE threshold in 2022, according to the United Way’s most recent report, which the nonprofit released last month. Across New York state, the numbers rose sharply from 2021 as pandemic aid was halted. A family of four in New York, with two working parents, lost $15,000 in tax credits and stimulus payments between 2021 and 2022.
“Anytime I mention the ALICE data, people who are not in need are shocked,” said Ruby Koch-Fienberg, the agriculture and food systems coordinator for Cornell Cooperative Extension of Putnam County. “But if you fall into the ALICE category, when you see the report, you’re like, ‘Yes, this is obvious.’ ”
Because of how long it takes to gather and calculate the data, it will take time to see how the numbers have changed since 2022 (the data can be fully explored at unitedforalice.org). But no one that I spoke to expects the more recent data to be any better.
That’s clear even in the anecdotal evidence from people on the front lines of the food insecurity crisis. Elder said that the Putnam CAP soup kitchen was serving 70 meals at lunchtime last year; this year it’s up to 130. Maria Helbock of the Philipstown Food Pantry noted a slight increase last weekend, which is typical as the holidays draw near. But despite Philipstown’s best efforts, the number of families showing up each week has stayed steady, even as the faces change.
“It reflects the reality of what I’m hearing from all the direct emergency food providers,” said Koch-Fienberg. “It’s meaningful to have data that reflects that. But we can see that the need has been increasing since 2022.”
Jason Angell, a farmer and member of the Philipstown Town Board, said that the increase of more than 4 percent in Philipstown families who earn below the ALICE threshold is particularly dispiriting after all the work undertaken in the Highlands to address food insecurity. But he wasn’t necessarily surprised.
He noted that the Town Board is looking into joining the state’s new Pro-Housing Communities program, which would make it eligible for certain grants if it can prove that it’s been permitting more housing.
“At some point you’ve got to look at what’s driving people to have to live paycheck to paycheck,” he said. “If you care about food security, you’re starting to tie it to things like affordable housing.”
Personal care aides comprise the largest category of workers in New York state by far, at 504,160. That’s more than twice the number of retail salespersons, the runner-up at 232,460. Wages for personal care aides have increased 21 percent since 2019, but not enough to keep up with inflation, which has risen at least 30 percent since then, according to Tom Gabriel from the United Way. As a result, 58 percent of personal care aides are living under the ALICE threshold.
“If you used to spend $100 on food, and now it’s $130 but your wages haven’t gone up by $30, then where is that money coming from?” he said. “That’s not a sustainable model for anyone, and that’s part of the reason why we have been clamoring about the fact that, no, the economy is not doing great.”
Stakes are higher
When the American Rescue Plan Act, enacted in 2021, directed over $700,000 in funds to Philipstown, Angell hoped that much of that would be used to make long-term investments that would eliminate food insecurity locally. “In a town like Philipstown, with our resources, we should have a goal of zero percent food insecurity,” he said in 2021. “That’s doable.”
Then the wells at the Garrison Landing water district ran dry and the town found itself paying thousands of dollars a month to truck in water for its residents. A new well had to be drilled. The food crisis money instead became the water crisis money.
It left only about $15,000 for food insecurity, which went toward a study to accurately assess food insecurity locally. But the study proved worth the money. It led to the county collaborating with Koch-Fienberg and Cornell Cooperative Extension to figure out ways to get more nutritious food in the hands of those who need it, without red tape getting in the way.
The results have been visible, and encouraging. Putnam’s new mobile food pantry makes several stops a week throughout the county to bring free, healthy food to those who need it, without paperwork or means testing. Davoren Farm collaborated with Philipstown to plant 10 tons of sweet potatoes on land owned by the town. In October, 120 volunteers harvested the potatoes, which were donated. Angell said that he’d like to see the success of the sweet potato project replicated next year in more places throughout the Highlands.
The study also led to the Bountiful Meals initiative at Second Chance. Much like the tiny food pantries and community fridges that can be found throughout Beacon, the Bountiful Meals program relies on community freezers with clear glass doors. The freezers have been installed in public places throughout the county, such as senior centers and libraries, and are stocked on a regular basis with frozen meals from Second Chance Foods.
“We’re trying to put them in places where people are already going to access services,” said Koch-Fienberg. 
Second Chance Foods will receive funds in Putnam’s 2025 budget, the first time the county has allocated money in its spending plan to the organization. But in order to significantly reverse the increases in ALICE families and food insecurity, the federal government is going to have to get back in the game. Some of the programs started during the pandemic need continuous funding, said Koch-Fienberg. What worries many local nonprofits is that the opposite will happen.
The incoming Trump administration has already hinted that, in order to offset the costs of extending tax cuts originally passed in 2017, it would look at cutting safety-net programs, including Medicaid and SNAP benefits. The prospect of introducing more stringent work requirements in order to receive benefits has also been floated. That’s before one even considers the threat of tariffs that could raise the costs of everyday goods and services by as much as 25 percent.
Nonprofits would be left to pick up the increasing slack. But Gabriel said that nonprofit donations and donors have both been decreasing over the past few years. Organizations have also been affected by rising inflation.
Gabriel said that 71 percent of nonprofits have seen an increase in the demand for their programs and services and 47 percent have also reported rising operating costs. “We know there’s going to be less funding available to nonprofit organizations to assist with food insecurity, and nonprofits have been doing more with less for a very long time,” he said.
Gabriel hopes local and state governments will step up and help nonprofits, who know the crisis better than anyone, continue the work. Without more local help, the dam that groups like Second Chance and the United Way have been shoring up for so long could finally break.
“There will be people on the street starving,” Gabriel warned. “That’s a fact. And they won’t have a place to go because nonprofits will not have the resources to provide for them.”
For more on food insecurity, see The Current’s 2021 series, Hunger in the Highlands.
Click here to download a list of food pantries and meal sources in Beacon.
